Have you ever noticed the pervasiveness of the "name and shame" strategy for promoting good behavior? It's usually a very effective one. The local county governance where I live, for example, currently has on the table a measure to publicly out dog owners who fail to pick up after their pets, presumably by publishing their names in the paper (granted, driving 5 mph over the speed limit here is also scandalous enough to get you in the paper).
I'll confess I'm a bit more attentive these days to my dogs' bowel movements and better-armed with baggies. But leaving aside for the moment the outrageous amount of time and red-faced passion that the council has spent deliberating on this issue, it's always been fascinating to me how emotionally compelled we as a species are to scream it from the rooftops whenever someone's been caught being naughty or when we think we've been wronged in some way.
Some of the most popular sites on the Internet, for example, trade in just this sort of angry, sardonic social fusillade (e.g., bitterwaitress.com, ratemyprofessors.com, juicycampus.com) and the ammo is all the more deadly in the online world because posters can avenge themselves behind the mantle of anonymity. We see the "name and shame" tactic in the real world everyday, too. Whereas transgressors used to be broadcast by the stocks or subjected to the Hester Prynn treatment, today it's public sex offender registries, the Better Business Bureau, or restaurateurs prominently displaying bounced checks next to their cash registers.
There's a lot of very promising evolutionary-based research happening in the field of reputation management right now, and this work helps us to understand both why we're so itchy to gossip about others when they've cheated or hurt us, and also why we're so preoccupied with what others think and know about us. (Sure, sure, you say you don't care what other people think about you. But c'mon, you're only kidding yourself.)
Let me give two quick plugs to the first-rate work of two of my amazingly talented graduate students working in this area. One of them, Gordon Ingram, has just completed a significant "ethnographic" analysis of tattle-tale behaviour in Northern Irish preschools and daycares. Tattle-tale in children is something of a developmental precursor to gossip, it seems. Gordon found a lot of very interesting things in this study. But one of the most interesting is the fact that "tootling" (telling others positive things about another child) virtually never happens whereas tattling (reporting transgressions) is natural and hard to suppress.
Another PhD student, Jared Piazza, has just published experimental research findings in the journal Evolution & Human Behavior demonstrating that when participants believe that their money-divvying behaviors (say, whether you should give another participant £3 vs £6 when you've been randomly chosen as the distributor of £10 between you), they're more generous when they believe that their decisions will be publicly discussed with yet another person. In other words, in this study the threat of negative gossip motivated pro-social behaviour, a finding clearly generalizable to non-laboratory behaviours.
Maybe it's not always true, but I'd wager that most of us are usually selfless only for selfish reasons. Sometimes we're aware of this consciously, but other times we're completely oblivious to the fact that the real reason we play by the rules is only that we don't want others to talk trash about us.
(Written trainbound Cambridge via London-Stansted. Here's an action shot of this post in motion.)
